Meet your maker, couch potatoes

On Sunday, when about 90 million people are expected to gather around TVs for the biggest sports party of the year, it might be fitting to raise the remote controls in a salute to Eugene Polley.

Polley, 90, who lives in a junk-cluttered house, plays pool for pocket change and likes a smooth gin and tonic, is the patron saint of couch potatoes--or he would be, if they knew who he was.

Fifty years ago, Polley invented the wireless remote. In return, he got $1,000 and a lifetime of gnawing irritation at being squeezed out of pop culture history. Now, he's trying to set the record straight.

"Not only did I not get credit for doing anything," said Polley, whose friends call him "Zapper," "I got a kick in the rear end."

About a half-billion remotes, in various incarnations, are on coffee tables, between couch pillows or who knows where in homes across the U.S. They have revolutionized the way TV is viewed and produced. Their technology has been adapted to open garage doors and turn on furnaces.

But the man who gets almost all the credit for inventing them is not Eugene Polley, a college dropout from Lombard. It is Robert Adler of Northbrook, an Austrian-born physicist with a PhD from the University of Vienna.

Adler came to work at Zenith Electronics Corp., then based in Chicago, in 1941. Polley joined Zenith as a mechanically inclined stock boy in 1935 and navigated his way into the engineering department.

The wireless remote Adler invented, known as the Space Command, was vastly more popular than Polley's earlier version. Zenith and other electronics manufacturers sold 9 million of the Adler-inspired "ultrasonic" units from the time they were introduced in the fall of 1956 until about 1982, when technology using infrared light began overtaking the consumer market.

But the Space Command came about a year after Polley created his remote for Zenith. Called the Flashmatic, it was a flashlight shaped like a sprinkler nozzle. The viewer would direct the beam of light at sensors in the corners of the set to change channels or turn the picture and sound on and off.

The Flashmatic was so popular Zenith was unable to keep up with demand. In less than a year, the electronics manufacturer sold 30,000 of the units. For his work, Polley received a $1,000 award from Zenith.

Glitches doom device

But the Flashmatic had some glitches. If the set were placed in direct sunlight, the TV could pop and sputter as if a poltergeist had taken up residence. And when the batteries in the remote started to run down, consumers thought the TV was malfunctioning.

When Zenith's founder and president, Eugene F. McDonald Jr., called for development of a better remote, Adler came up with the concept of using sound. His "clicker" had small hammers that struck rods to produce a high-frequency sound that signaled the TV.

But Adler's "ultrasonic" technology also was flawed. The TV could be set off by keys jingling, dog tags rattling or a coin jar being emptied on the carpet in front of the set. It also was expensive, adding $100 to the TV's cost.

Those flaws, however, were perceived as less obvious than the problems with the Flashmatic. So corporate muscle got behind the ultrasonic technology, leaving historians and experts to scratch their heads at the mention of Eugene Polley.

"I've heard Adler's name," said Jim Barry, spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association and former editor of what is now Sound & Vision magazine. "Polley doesn't ring a bell."

Barry added that electronics inventions typically are the product of "a variety of people working on them." As time passes, Barry said, "it kind of coalesces around one person."

Adler, 92, agrees that history has focused on him, and he is more than a little uncomfortable with the distinction as father of the remote.

"I don't believe it has a single father," said Adler, who continues to work as a consultant. "But the general public wants one name to attach to something."

Bob Gerson, founder of This Week In Consumer Electronics (TWICE) magazine who has written about consumer electronics since 1961, noted: "Everybody's always referred to Adler as the true father of the remote. But Polley came first. That doesn't always make you the hero."

In the end, Polley's technology, crude as it was, proved best. Today's infrared remotes use a low-frequency light beam detected by a receiver in the TV or DVD player or any number of consumer electronic devices.

Zenith's corporate history Web page credits Polley with the first practical wireless remote. But its biography of Adler calls him the "Father of the TV Remote Control," a status that gained strength and depth over the years. Adler surfaced on "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno and was featured routinely in news stories on the anniversaries of the Space Command's debut.